In the parlance of the intelligence business, they are known as RED — Retired, Extremely Dangerous.

But their movie? There I'm afraid the acronym only stands for Recycled, Expensive, Dull.

The first film, in 2010, adapted a comic book — and took a hint from Sly Stallone's recently revived, senior-citizen action career — to feature Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman as old but still deadly spies.

The actual story made very little sense, but it did feature four old pros doing what they do best — Mirren being droll, Malkovich acting oddly, Freeman waxing wise and Willis smirking and pretending to be sexual TNT. And that was enough for it to be a surprise hit.

Which, no surprise, set us up for a sequel.

It's minus Freeman this time but the other three are back — still being droll, odd and smirky/sexy, as the script (and their paychecks) demand. And this time it adds a wizened Anthony Hopkins (and oddly orange Catherine Zeta Jones), too.
Except none of it comes to much good.

There are people out to kill them again, and some sort of secret weapon being sought. Zeta Jones is a tricky Russian. Hopkins plays a dotty old scientist who seems to be locked away in one of Hannibal Lecter's old rooms.

Oh, and Byung-hun Lee is in there too, as a Korean assassin on Willis' trail. And he adds absolutely nothing, except an obvious bit of pandering to the overseas market, where these big-on-bangs, low-on-nuance Hollywood movies now make their real money.

The script, however, is once again strictly a piece of hackwork, and the direction has no real wit or inventiveness; it's hard to believe the same filmmaker, Dean Parisot, once gave us the sublimely silly, and knowing, "Galaxy Quest."

Potentially comic scenes — a mysterious funeral, a romantic evening between two suspicious ex-lovers — go absolutely nowhere. The action scenes, while relatively well-staged, are all played absolutely straight.

Malkovich, at least, is enjoying himself as the petulant, slightly drug-addled Marvin; he makes some funny faces behind people's backs, and the sight of him stalking around with Willis like a couple of armed, angrily bald babies, is worth a brief smile.

But a movie which continually resorts to putting its characters in purposely awful clothes to get a laugh is a movie which is coasting on fumes, and the whole thing shudders to a stop long before the de rigueur tick-tick-tick ending of a bomb that needs to be defused.

That sort of thing was old hat three decades and several Bonds ago, way back in "Octopussy" days. By now? It just needs to be retired — like these agents, and definitely like this franchise.